Monday, January 25, 2010

You might recall that I posted about "numbers stations" some time back. "Backwards music" or "Whalesong" stations are a rarer phenomenon, but are every bit as creepy. Consisting of nothing but gently rising and descending electronic tones, these mysterious signals really do sound like whale songs. Not much seems to be known about these other than that they appear to originate from the US and Europe.

It's almost certainly an Ultra Low Frequency data channel for communicating with submarines or some other naval vessels, where time is not critical, and location of the reciever is unknown. The signals are encoded into audio frequencies that carry well under water, widely broadcast, then picked up by transducer bouys that relay the radio signal into audio that is piped into the seas. Subs pick these up, and decode them.